Gramophone et al.

Pe-Zulu wrote:

I likewise gave up on Gramophone three or four years ago, after having bought it every month for 15 years or so.
When I venture to France I usually buy Diapason and as a one off usually find it a good read, but that's probably more to do with the novelty of it being in French, and an interest inhow differently they often see (and hear!) things.
FonoForum in Germany is very difficult to track down, but I managed it last week. Nothing much in it, really. Very few CD reviews and an anodine article about Elgar.
So what's going on?
Have I turned into the aged grumpy codger in the corner?
Has the quality of the magazines gone down? (They do seem to have changed, with fewer reviews and more "features".)
Maybe it's just that I now have a satisfactory version of most major works by most major composers (whatever that means), but that ought to make me more curious about the rest.
How many of you still buy the review magazines. If so, why; if not, why not?

 

I've still got a subscription to Gramophone, but been thinking about stopping it, never quite get round to it.

I don't think its a bad magazine, the reviews are still OK and some articles can be interesting. But a bit bland and shy of strong opinions. It could have been a lot worse after it got taken over by Haymarket, but its not dumbed-down as much as I feared it would - apart from the Audio section which is now a total waste of space.

Also not happy about the columns by non-experts.... why are they given regular feature in a specialist magazine? I have no objection to Harriet Smith and Arnando Iannucci (in fact I'm a big fan of his comedy shows and writing) but their knowledge of classical music is no greater than mine. Its just light entertainment, fair enough I suppose.

 

Diapason was alright, but I found that in recent issues I read it diagonally most of the time. What is more, the current lot of reviewers and I seem to be often in disagreement. The old ones - Michel Roubinet, Adelaïde de Place - I usually understood. The current crop is perhaps from a different generation.

I hate the 'ratings'. If the reviewer just tried to describe what the player tried to convey that would be fine. Giving notes is silly and, more than that, unfair. Once one commits his or her visions of a given piece of music, unless the version is incompetent, the reviewer must respect what the player achieved, whatever his or her (I mean the critics') opinions about the result. One can say one does not agree and explain why.

But then, in order to really not agree, one usually has to know the piece very well indeed and I found that that not always occurred.

Les critiques d'art ne servent à rien, Chiricho once said (Art critics are good for nothing). I could not agree more. Very often they just express their opinions (or repeat other people's opinions which is far worse), often in a very French authoritarian way, and I abhor the conceit and arrogance of such proceedings (and also the cowardice: they speak from above because they do not have to play and show themselves).

Gramophone I found uninteresting. I always found the reviews extremely superficial and also extremely chauvinistic (alas, that also happened with Diapason).

I have most of the records I want. Sometimes a friend points a CD to me, and I try it. In fact, this is what this forum is all about: sharing what we like and what we do not like. I have bough many records based on what I read here.

And i fear some of us are growing old and grumpy. But then, we know what we like and that is enough. May we continue to exchange views as equals in a civilized manner as we always have around here.